CHAPTER 13 Amelia
Amelia
He holds my hand like it’s the most natural thing in the world. And I’m concluding that it feels this way because it is. Being with Jake is as easy as breathing; easier, sometimes.
Is it time to do something about the way I feel about him? My heart thumps at the thought.
“It’s nice out here,” Jake says, filling the comfortable silence between us.
I watch the waves crashing on the shore, feel the soft sand underfoot, shiver at the slight breeze that brushes against us. It’s more than nice, it’s perfect. Like this moonlit walk on the beach was crafted especially for us, for us to finally speak our truth to each other.
“Here.” Jake takes off his jacket and drapes it over my shoulders. “You’re cold.”
I pull the lapels of his suit jacket together, subtly sniffing as I do. Yummy, it smells like Jake. My new favourite smell.
“Thanks,” I mutter, avoiding his eyes, which I can feel peering at me.
We continue walking without a destination, my thoughts still a jumbled mess in my head. Before tonight, my reservations about Jake and how to process what I feel for him were still up in the air, but after that dance, after the words he said to me, after the way he made me feel, well, none of my reasons for not being with him seem…well, reasonable, anymore.
My stomach swirls.
“Do you think we should talk?” I look up at him, our gazes colliding. He’s giving me a soft look; a hopeful look and my heart takes off racing again at the sight of it.
“Do you want to sit?”
Without consideration for the fabric of my fanciest dress or what the sand may do to it, I sink down, grateful to be giving my shaky legs a break.
“So,” he blows out a big breath. “What do you want to talk about?”
I stare at him, at his deep green eyes, which seem to see me better than anybody ever has, and my tongue promptly ties itself into a knot.
“My mind is a little muddled.” I tap my forehead and roll my eyes at my absurdity. “Can we just sit for a bit?”
He picks up my hand again—I love holding his hand so much—and says nothing. His thumb draws lazy circles over the back of mine and I’m catapulted back in time. To a situation not unlike this, when he’d happily offered me quiet comfort.
*****
I’d been dating Robby for only a short while—less than two months—and we’d gotten into a fight. It had probably been over Robby being selfish or carelessly cruel. I’d stormed out of his room in a huff, stumbling into his big brother. The one I’d been avoiding seeing.
“Are you OK?” he asked me, his voice deeper with concern.
I shrugged. “Not really.”
His jaw had clenched, and he glared in the direction of Robby’s room.
“What did he do this time?”
I smiled at him, at his assumption that the fight had to be Robby’s fault. That he hadn’t even considered it could have been mine.
“He’s just being Robby.” I said this, knowing that if anyone was to understand how difficult life with Robby could be, it would be his brother.
Jake grunted under his breath and disappeared into the kitchen, while I flopped down onto the couch.
“You need more paintings on your walls,” I called out, unreasonably annoyed at the lack of any art or pictures in their otherwise comfortable house. Instead, there was just a large flat-screen TV and a whole heap of boy video game equipment.
“I’ll get right on it,” he said with a wry smile, putting a cup of tea in front of me. Made just how I liked it.
“Are you going back in there? To sort things out?” He gave me a curiously blank look, and I shook my head. No way was I going to make up with Robby any time soon.
“Want to watch TV out here then?”
I was shocked he offered to hang out with me, being more accustomed to him doing rapid about turns and leaving the room whenever I was around.
“Sounds good.” I handed him the remote, as I was used to doing with Robby, frowning when he returned it to me.
“You choose.”
Two simple words. A flood of warmth filled me upon hearing them, and I laughed at his appalled expression when I pressed play on the pilot episode of Gilmore Girls. And yet, he stayed sitting next to me, his mere presence offering comfort, and watched two full episodes.
“Why do they have to talk so fast?” he asked with a baffled expression as he tried to keep up with the rapid-fire dialogue. “And Rory is too young to drink so much coffee.”
I poked him for being such an “old stick-in-the-mud” and laughing together, we settled back in to watch one more episode. For three episodes we sat close on the couch, not touching, but near enough for me to feel the warmth radiating from his body. And during that time, Robby had not come out of his room. Had not even deigned to look for me. To see if I was OK. Or even still around.
“He doesn’t deserve you; you know?” Jake said, reading my mind. Not for the first time.
I sighed. I did know. And I also knew I’d probably do nothing to fix the situation, that Robby, for all his faults, was my guy. The one I’d chosen to be with.
“He’s not so bad.”
Jake opened his mouth to say something when Robby finally flounced out of his room, coming up short when he saw us together.
“Amelia? You’re still here?”
I glared at him, shifting away from Jake and standing up to confront him. Only he didn’t give me the chance. Instead, he flung himself on the ground in front of me, gesticulating wildly while he begged—literally begged—for my forgiveness. And me being the idiot that I was, I forgave him. In front of his brother, who had just told me I deserved better.
*****
And he’s still telling me this after all this time. Maybe it’s time to believe him?
“I’m sorry,” I say to him now, though I’m not sure what I’m exactly apologising for. Maybe everything that happened from that first meeting onward, from that first meeting when I should have chosen him?
“For what?” His eyebrows are drawn in confusion and his hand squeezes mine.
“For being such a hot mess that you have to keep picking up the pieces. For being the girl who you constantly need to say nice things to so I don’t cry,” I say while batting away tears. I will not cry…this time.
He exhales. Like it pains him to hear me say this. “Amelia, I don’t say this so that you won’t cry…” He trails off at the look I’m giving him, his beautiful mouth twisting into a wry smile. “OK, I definitely hate seeing you upset. But it’s not why I tell you these things. I say it because it’s the truth and I desperately want you to believe it. To believe in yourself.”
His words floor me. Has anyone ever spoken to me this way? Instinctively knowing exactly what I need to hear?
I gather my tattered composure like a cloak around me. “That may well be true, but I’m sorry all the same. For continuing to put you in these situations.”
“Don’t you know I want to be here for you?” He says the words softly but with so much sincerity that I don’t doubt him. I know he’s the guy who wouldn’t lie to me. Maybe the only guy who wouldn’t lie to me.
“I made so many mistakes.” I don’t tell him what they are, hoping he’ll know. Starting with picking his brother that first night.
He nods like he understands, and we fall back into silence.
“Can I ask you something?” His strained voice breaks the quiet surrounding us. I brace myself for his question, knowing what’s about to come.
“OK.”
“That night we met,” he starts and stops.
I turn to look at him, his profile so perfectly silhouetted by the night sky behind him. His jaw is clenched and his eyes are narrowed as he stares straight ahead.
“Yes?” I give him permission to continue.
“Why did you choose to stay with Robby?” There, it’s out there. The big, pink, sparkly elephant in the room is finally being addressed. “I mean, I get it, you guys were there to meet, but I thought, maybe incorrectly, that we had a spark, you know, before he turned up.”
His vulnerability in admitting this urges me to give it back to him. “We did,” I assure him, earning another hand squeeze. “From my end, the sparks were sizzling. I was 100 per cent sure you were there to meet me. That you were my match.”
He turns to face me and our eyes lock. OK, maybe he doesn’t always need to wear his glasses. Unfettered access to his green gaze has my heart ping-ponging around in my chest.
“So, what happened?”
I shrug, embarrassed by my choice that night. “Robby turned up, and I got…confused?”
“Confused?” he repeats my word back to me, slowly.
“I thought, incorrectly it turns out, that I had to trust the algorithm. That the people from the LIB app had picked the perfect guy for me, and that guy was Robby.”
Jake snorts, and I let out a giggle. Boy, was that algorithm wrong.
“And then Robby said something about you…and I guess I got triggered?”
He looks so alarmed that I scoot in closer to him, linking my arm through his.
“What did he say?”
“He told me you were a workaholic, that you were married to your job, that he was surprised to see you out when all you do is work, work, work. And given my experience with my dad, this had all my alarm bells ringing. Dousing all those lovely sparks.”
Jake digests this information and I wait. Thinking back again to that night, to that snap decision that I’ve forced myself to live with ever since.
“That’s all it took? For you to choose Robby?”
I shake my head. “That’s all it took in that moment, but I can’t deny that I liked your brother. Really liked him, enough to date him for six months. I also can’t deny that I was—am—pretty messed up and believed that the type of relationship I had with Robby was normal. Was what I deserved.”
His already clenched jaw hardens further and I ache for the pain I feel I’m causing him. But if we’re ever going to be anything, he needs to know the truth.
“Robby was who I thought I should be with; he fit my type exactly. He appeared to be fun-loving, spontaneous, a dreamer. And it’s what I told myself I wanted. It turns out I’ve been choosing men who were the complete opposite of my dad.” I stop and let out a small laugh. “It should have been obvious to me how I picked these types of men, but apparently I enjoyed having my head deeply buried in the sand.”
“We all have issues from our past that shape the way we behave as adults,” he says, excusing my behaviour. And I love him for trying.
“It’s not just that. I was choosing men the opposite of my dad, true, but I was also dating men who I knew deep down I could never love, so that I’d never be truly hurt when they would inevitably leave me. Turns out I probably need some therapy.”
“We could all benefit from therapy,” he says, again chiming in with the most perfect comment.
“I think all of this played a part in why…” I trail off, not wanting to say more because it will reveal too much, anxiety at the rawness of this moment swirling through me.
“Why?” he probes, not letting me off the hook this time.
“Why I let you walk away that night. And why I’ve been going out on all these dates, instead of just letting you in.”
I hear his swift intake of breath, turning my head away from him and focussing on the waves lapping at the shore in front of us.
“I started visiting the Love, Lilly café a week after you broke up with Robby,” he says after a few minutes of charged silence, his tone now casual, like I hadn’t just laid my heart out there for him.
“Oh?” I’m struggling to keep up with this swift turn in the conversation.
“I heard you talk about it with Robby so many times that I thought there may be a good chance I’d see you there.”
Ah, now I’m following.
“I went in a few times a week, hoping to catch a glimpse of you. See how you’re doing. Just see you.”
My face flushes and my heart takes off racing so fast I fear it’s about to escape my chest. He came looking for me?
“And then you were never there at the same time as me. But by that time, I was hooked…”
“On the brownies?”
We both laugh.
“Yes, the brownies. And the atmosphere. I enjoyed watching Bella and Lilly interact. It made me feel closer to you, as stalker-ish as that may sound.”
“Very stalker-ish!”
He pinches my side. “And then when Bella and Lilly opened the gallery next door, I bought several of Bella’s paintings, because someone had once told me in a huff that I needed to hang some art on my walls.”
I flashback to the night of Bella’s wedding, when I’d been slouched on his couch, staring at the landscape of the Melbourne skyline hanging on his wall. That was one of Bella’s paintings! No wonder it had looked so familiar.
“You bought Bella’s paintings?”
He nods. “Her work is exceptional.”
His praise of my friend’s work does little to stop my heart pounding in my chest. Why must he be so perfect?
“It is,” I agree, not knowing what else to say. We’d both revealed a lot in this conversation, and I don’t know where to go from here.
Jake, it seems, does know where he wants this to go. “That night, the night we all met?”
I smile at the use of the word ‘all’.
“I’d been at the restaurant for ten minutes waiting for Steven, who is habitually late. He’d forced me to meet him at this ‘trendy new place’, the sort of place that Robby would love and I would hate, and from the minute I arrived my feet were itching to leave, to get home and work on a brief that needed to be done by the end of the weekend. And then you walked in.”
I held my breath, dying to know what he’s going to say next.
“It was like there was a spotlight on you. One minute I’d been lost in the document I was reading on my phone, the next my eyes were glued to you. And then my feet that had been wanting to leave were suddenly guiding me to the bar. To where you’d just sat down.”
“And you said hi, and I was sure you were my match.”
He hums. “Little did I know there was some sort of artificial intelligence who’d already set you up with my brother.”
I frown along with him, equally as disappointed in this technology fail as he seems to be.
“We can’t blame just the supercomputer,” I say to lighten the mood and also because it’s true. The whole mess is purely my fault.
“I had to watch you with him.” His voice is pained, tortured, and I lay my head on his shoulder, trying to get closer.
“I’m sorry.” I can’t say anything else. There’s no taking back what had come before this. The only question is whether he wants anything with me moving forward.
“I waited for you,” he says in a low voice, his head now resting on mine. “At the café and just in general. I waited for you to get over my brother and then you came to my door looking for him…”
I interrupt him, needing to make my intentions that night crystal clear. “That was to kick his butt.”
He chuckles. “I know. But then after that…the whole dating plan…what am I supposed to do with that?”
I lift my head away from his shoulder, turning his face to mine with my forefinger. “I didn’t know you wanted to do anything…with any of it. I didn’t know.”
He is solemn as he stares back at me. “Do you know now?”
My entire body tingles at this question, asked in that deep, deep voice of his. I do know now, but am I brave enough to do something about it? The trickle of anxiety turns into a river and I’m drowning in it. If I make a move towards Jake, I’d be risking heartbreak. Real heartbreak.
The weight of this decision forces me back onto the sand behind me, Jake’s jacket doing its best to act as a blanket. Jake follows me down, lying next to me, our faces only inches apart.
“Amelia?” He says my name as both a question and a plea, and, my fears subside.
I don’t think anymore. I just do.
Leaning over, I close the distance between us, pressing my lips against his. They fit perfectly against him and feel as firm and soft as I’d imagined they would.
How can lips be both firm and soft?
All thoughts leave my brain as Jake takes over, turning the kiss from a gentle exploration of each other to something more, something demanding. Something that feels like the best kiss I’d ever had. As he deepens the kiss, his hands sink into my hair, pulling me closer, closer and I comply, wanting to crawl under his skin and never leave.
“I’ve wanted to do that for so long,” he mumbles as we come up for air, our lips swollen from the intensity of that kiss. “For so long.”
I don’t answer him, instead pulling his face back to mine, determined to get lost in the wonder of his kisses again. Forever this time. He rolls me over so I’m lying on my back and hovers over me, raining gentle kisses all over my face, his lips velvety soft on my eyelids, my nose, my lips, before moving to my cheeks, brushing his lips over them, once, twice, three times.
“I’ve wanted to kiss your freckles from the minute I met you,” he says, his voice low and gravelly, stealing my breath away. “Every single one of them.”
I melt at this. At the thought of him delighting in the freckles I painstakingly cover up every morning.
This. Being with Jake like this. I could do this forever.
Panic hits and I struggle to breathe.
What am I doing? Should I be melting into Jake? The one man with the power to hurt me should he choose to?
My head spins as the implications of what we’ve just done sinks in, even though I wanted to do it with every fibre of my being, and I sit up, pushing him away both literally and metaphorically.
“Amelia?” Jake looks at me, with a patient, almost resigned expression.
“I need a minute.” My voice is breathless, like I’d just run a marathon. My heart certainly feels like I had, what with all the blood pumping that went along with that kiss.
“Take a minute. Take two, but please don’t shut me out.” He’s reading my mind and can see that I’m scrambling. Away from him, it would seem.
“I think we should go back.” His face falls. “Bella will be looking for me.” This is true, but it was also true ten minutes ago, twenty minutes ago, without me giving her one single thought.
“OK.” His voice is now devoid of any emotion. He stands up and wipes the sand off his pants. Leaning over, he offers me his hand, his big strong solid hand that seems to always be there to hold me steady. To help me up. To keep me up.
“Thanks.” I take his hand and with some trouble, stand up next to him, brushing the sand out of my hair, my face, my dress, his jacket. I just know I’ll be finding sand in places for days to come. “Let’s go?”
He’s no longer looking at me. His hand, which was holding mine, is now tucked into his pocket. With a muscle twitching in his cheek, he nods. Once. “Let’s go.”
The silence between us on the walk back to the Brighton Beach Club is no longer comfortable but instead is fraught with all the things I wish I could say. If my mind would just unjumble itself. I’m reeling from that kiss and all the emotion that came with it and I know I’m too emotionally stunted to put any coherent words together right now.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. For what, the hundredth time?
“It’s OK.” His voice is dull, so unlike the voice I’m used to, the one that feels like a caress.
We walk side by side but now with a crater of unspoken words between us, up the stairs leading to the ballroom. When we get to the doors, I put my hand on his arm to stop him from walking in ahead of me. I need to fix this.
“I wanted that to happen!” The words burst out of me, earning me a quick flash of his dimple. “I need you to know that.”
His gaze softens on me. “OK.”
“OK?”
He nods.
“I’m going to go find Bella.” I tilt my head towards the doors beside us. “But we’ll talk soon?”
When my mind is less frazzled by your masterful kisses, I think but don’t share.
“Yes, let’s talk soon.”
I stare up at him, memorising his face in this moment, the moment after we’d kissed for the first time. After we’d said so much. His lips are pink and rosy and slightly swollen—I did that, my inner voice whispers smugly—and his hair is tousled, the work of my fingers. He’s delightfully mussed, and I wish I wasn’t walking away from him. I wish I was walking away with him.
“OK, bye.” My stupid brain says these words while my dumb hands give him a wave and my loser legs walk me away from him.
Why-oh-why am I not still out there kissing him? And how am I going to fix myself so I can make sure this all works out in the end?
“There you are!” Bella huffs, appearing from nowhere to suddenly be standing next to me. “Where have you been?”
I touch my fingers to my also swollen lips and glance back to where Jake is no longer standing. “Oh, Bella. I think I messed up. Royally messed up.”
She gives me a concerned look, taking the hand that belongs to Jake and squeezing it. “Whatever it is, we can handle it.”
I look into her earnest face and want to believe her. But then I picture the sadness in Jake’s and I wonder if there’s any way to solve this.
“Let’s go back to my place and talk this out. We’ll come up with a plan. You’ll see.”
Another plan.I groan internally.
“This plan needs to be better than your last.”
I must sound as bad as I feel, because she launches herself at me, hugging me tightly and whispering in my ear, “Whatever it is, we can make it better.”
Returning her hug, I hope, on all the shooting stars, that she’s right. That we find a way to sort out all my tangled emotions. And that in doing this, we find me a way back to Jake.